1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a multi-class discriminating device.
2. Description of the Related Art
When happen to see a flower in the fields or on roadsides, we often come to want to know the name of the flower. A technique of using a statistic method to discriminate the sort of the flower has been proposed, for example, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2002-203242. A digital image of the flower and/or the leaves of the flower is obtained by shooting. The technique uses a clustering method to extract a number of features of local parts of the flower and/or the leaf, and a histogram of the extracted features is created to obtain single or plural feature amounts. Further, the technique refers to a previously prepared database, in which feature amounts of the various sorts of flowers are registered, to analyze the obtained feature amounts of the flower, thereby discriminating the sort of the flower.
When an image classification is performed on image data such as data of flowers, a so-called two-class discriminating device, which classifies images into two classes, one sort of images and the other sort of images, can be easily realized in the field of machine learning. Meanwhile, when a multi-class image classification is performed to discriminate some sorts of images from plural sorts of images, it is general to use a so-called multi-class discriminating device consisting of a combination of two-class discriminating devices. For instance, when images of flowers are classified into six sorts of images, six two-class discriminating devices are generated. Each of the six discriminating devices is generated, such that said discriminating device outputs the maximum score value when an image of the sort designated thereto is entered. When images are entered to the discriminating devices, respectively, the sort of flowers will be obtained as the discrimination result, which sort has been assigned to the discriminating device which outputs the most maximum score value, among the six discriminating devices.